George Harrison Born: The Quiet Beatle With the Loudest Legacy

George Harrison learned to play guitar on a bus. He and Paul McCartney rode the same bus to school in Liverpool, and Harrison practiced chords relentlessly, his fingers bleeding against the steel strings. Born on February 25, 1943, in Wavertree, Liverpool, he was the youngest Beatle and the most underestimated. He was 14 when he auditioned for the Quarrymen, the skiffle group John Lennon had formed, and Lennon initially thought he was too young. McCartney persuaded Lennon to let him in. Harrison's musical interests were broader than his bandmates'. He introduced the sitar to Western pop music on "Norwegian Wood" in 1965, an instrument he studied under Ravi Shankar in India. He wrote "Something," which Frank Sinatra called the greatest love song of the past fifty years, and "Here Comes the Sun," two of the most enduring songs in the Beatles catalog. His guitar work was distinctive: economical, melodic, and always in service of the song rather than personal display. The slide guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was played by Eric Clapton, whom Harrison invited because he thought the other Beatles would take the recording more seriously with an outsider in the room. After the Beatles dissolved in 1970, Harrison released "All Things Must Pass," a triple album that had been building for years because Lennon and McCartney had dominated the Beatles' recording sessions, leaving Harrison little space for his own material. It became the best-selling solo album by any Beatle. He organized the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, the first major charity concert in rock history. He co-founded HandMade Films, which produced "Monty Python's Life of Brian." He died of lung cancer on November 29, 2001, at age 58.